This was such a blatant price-fixing scheme among the publishers that it's surprising to me that it took the DOJ this long to take action.
Knowing something and being ready to take it to court are two different things. Also, part of the delay was settlement talks (which may have included cooperation on gathering evidence against the remaining defendants--notice that settlements with three of the five charged publishers were announced simultaneously with the announcement of the filing of the lawsuit.
But if there's a paper trail mentioning Amazon, I think Apple is toast.
The direct quotes in the complaint suggest that there is considerable paper trail mentioning targetting Amazon, both among the publishers and from Apple to the publishers.
The DOJ's angle appears to be the "most favored nation" clause
Actually, no, the DoJ's angle on collusion appears to be (from actually reading the complaint -- see the section "VI. DEFENDANTS' UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES" beginning on page 12) the series of communications between the publishers in which they conspired to jointly raise the retail prices of e-books by establishing the agency model as standard, which was initiated prior to Apple's attempts to enter the e-book market, and continued after that entrance (and specifically included mutual support in conflicts with Amazon after the Apple deals were implemented.)
The MFN clause is alleged to have become a key signalling mechanism once Apple was brought in, but isn't the key of the case alleging the existence of collusion.
And so what? That trafic signal is there only because a car is a danger for everything around it. There is no need to control the bike
Independently of why the signal is there and whether there is a need to control the bike (which, by the way, you are quite wrong on, as you would know if you'd ever been anywhere with large numbers of bikes and paid any attention), the fact is that the traffic signal is there, and actually affects the ability to operate any vehicle through the intersection. Consequently, there is a substantial practical disadvantage to a vehicle that will not be detected by mechanisms designed to provide traffic-responsive behavior for the signal, even if it is not the kind of vehicle that motivated the placement of the signal.
As a desktop UI, you have to ask what the hell they were smoking. Something designed for touchscreen input on a 4" device does *not* scale to a 24" screen with a keyboard/mouse. While it's usable, it would be very counter-productive to anybody who's comfortable with the mouse, because they would have to scroll through pages of tiles to find the one they want.
Having enough top-level options that you have to scroll through them to find the one you want is bad no matter the form factor. While I don't know if the existing Metro implementation lets you do this, having tiles for groups of options that explode-on-hover (reducing the old list to a single tile that you can return to) would seem to be consistent with the Metro UI design principles and be a good approach for a keyboard-and-mouse interface.
The Metro implementation may currently suck for lots of uses, but the UI principles its built in I think are good UI principals that ought to get more attention in UI design.
The only people who like the horrible UI mess that is Metro is the true believers.
I'm not at all an MS fan, but Metro seems to be a good direction in UIs, and not just for mobile devices. The pile-of-papers metaphor of traditional windowing UIs is really a horrible mess when you think about it, and recent trend in adding 3D and transparency features to it doesn't really address the problem.
The Metro approach is an approach that really has a lot going for it. I'm not saying the implementation is necessarily great, but the concepts, starting from content-not-chrome, are good and I expect that UIs will continue to evolve in the direction Metro is pointing.
Actually, I think there would be for Google. I'd argue that they should be concentrating on keeping the web from being swallowed up by huge sites like Facebook, which will develop their own advertising and revenue streams.
They are. That's rather the point of Google own social networking efforts.
Pushing open standards without their own strong social networking system (as they have in the past) was a failure. Just as their fight to drive more general web standards the way they wanted led to building their own browser that directly competed with the existing dominant browsers, and their fight to avoid the mobile space from being locked up by a dominant vendor that wasn't Google that could lock Google out of revenues led to building their own mobile OS that competed directly with the existing dominant mobile OSs, so their fight to stop the web getting locked up by a single social networking vendor leads to building a social network that competes with Facebook.
I think this is essentially their strategy with Android. It's a better strategy than going into direct competition with Facebook
Their strategy with Android was going into direct competition with Apple for mobile OS's and linked services (they didn't compete with them as directly with handsets, but they aren't concerned with Apple-as-handset-manufacturer, they are concerned with Apple-as-mobile-OS-vendor.)
So, applying their strategy with Android to social networking would be "a better strategy than going into direct competition with Facebook", it would be exactly the strategy of going into direct competition with Facebook.
(And its a strategy that's worked with Chrome and Android, though in both cases early on people said that those efforts were doomed to have little benefit for Google given how well established the major competition was in each area, and that Google would be better off not going to toe-to-toe with them.)
But he also wants to offer the kind of personalized service that the requires trampling on your privacy.
Using information voluntarily provided to provide services to the person providing information isn't "trampling on" the privacy of the person providing the information.
Sharing that information with third parties in a means beyond what that for which there is meaningful informed consent is.
Getting bent out of shape over things that don't impinge on privacy as if they did impedes efforts to focus attention on stopping actions that genuinely impinge on privacy.
ust like the police ignored eyewitness testimony that did not agree with Zimmerman's account...
No, the police didn't. Which is why the lead homicide investigator wanted Zimmerman charged. It was the DA that rejected that on the basis that, given "SYG" and the inconsistencies in the evidence, there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.
If being in contempt of DHS was punishable, we would all be in jail.
You are mistaking "punishable" for "universally and consistently punished". But the point of making very common things punishable is generally for them not to be universally and consistently punished, but to provide easy pretexts for arbitrary punishment where the real motivation for the punishment isn't the thing that is "punishable".
A more accurate statement would be "if being in contempt of DHS was punishable, there would be a convenient pretext for punishing anyone".
No, but if they then use that password, they are accessing a restricted system against the expressed wishes of the owner, FaceBook, which expressly forbids sharing passwords.
If you reread GP, the role of certain sites terms of service in regards to existing law was already addressed. Not all sites ToS expressly forbid sharing passwords (a common alternative is for the ToS to include the account holder expressly accepting responsibility for all use with their password.)
While Facebook is the biggest social networking site and often the center of attention, the issue isn't about Facebook alone, its about online account passwords more generally.
There are existing laws which make the request for account passwords illegal
No, there aren't. There are existing laws which may make accessing a computer system illegal even with a password given to you by the owner of the password, depending on the terms of service under which the owner of the system provides service to the password holder. Nothing makes it illegal in general for an employer to make such a request or to make use of the password obtained through it.
including the fifth amendment and that pesky little clause about search and seizure.
Requesting a password as a condition of employment or any other beneficial or contractual arrangement is in no way a violation of either the Fourth Amendment or Fifth Amendment. (Using employment as a pretext by the government when the target is a criminal suspect and then using the information in a criminal trial might be, but that's not the general issue.)
Isn't Facebook planning to sue companies that do this in a civil court?
Unless Facebook can demonstrate actual damages, they probably have no case, at least under federal law. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act provides criminal sanctions, and provides civil sanctions to anyone experiencing actual damage or loss.
The Stored Communication Act also provides criminal and civil sanction and does provide statutory minimum damages, but incorporates a broad rates of exemptions from civil action including prior consent of a party to the communication.
So, neither seems likely to be of much use to Facebook.
And aren't there laws in place that effectively prohibit this?
No, there are not (in the general case of demanding online account passwords.) In some specific cases, the combination of existing laws and terms of service prohibiting password sharing might prevent this (some TOS don't prohibit password sharing, they require the user to accept liability for any use with their password -- so in the case of sites with TOS of this form, nothing in existing law would prohibit the demand), and even then may not provide appropriate remedies.
It also may not have been appropriate as an amendment to this particular bill
The US Congress, unlike some state legislatures, has no single subject rule and neither party has ever been adverse to non-germane legislation in general. The only reason that an amendment is not "appropriate" for a particular bill is that someone wants to be able to defeat the rule in the amendment without defeating the bill.
Lets take a little look at the history of Microsoft and clearly understand what we're getting into before we blindly adapt one of their standards.
No one -- even Microsoft -- is asking for "blind adoption". The Microsoft proposal offers numerous explicit issues for discussion and raises and provides a recommendations for addressing numerous issues with regards to Google's earlier proposal (both as regards to pragmatics and consistency with the HTTP/2.0 charter.) Its a discussion draft. Its not intended for blind adoption, its intended to spur further discussion in the work group.
But they can't. Seriously. It is illegal now. In Texas, it is a state jail crime. (I am sure in other states too, but I do not know all the laws.) The FaceBook TOS forbids sharing passwords, and using another password is "accessing a computer or system without the express permission of the owner" and put both the user and the employer in violation of the Texas hacking statute.
The same is a federal crime under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC Sec. 1030) if the computer accessed is a "protected computer", including a government computer or, more relevantly, one "used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States".
Well, unauthorized access per se isn't a crime, but if one does almost anything with that access it is a crime, including if one "obtains...information from any protected computer".
And, as well as a crime, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act also provides a civil cause of action for anyone who "suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of this section" (note that conspiracy is also covered under the same section, so the civil cause of action would seem to be available if the damage was caused by a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access that didn't actually lead to unauthorized access, such as retaliation -- by refusal to consider for a job or, even more clearly, dismissal from one -- for failure to provide a password contrary to an agreement with the computer's owner.)
When is the last time Congress passed *any* law that benefited consumers at the expense of corporations?
Maybe not the most last, but recent examples include:
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010) HITECH Act (part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act) (2009)
Interesting use of Web technologies. But as a practical matter, isn't storing user progress data on the client side a really bad idea from an anti-cheating standpoint?
Not necessarily.
Storing it on the client and sending it back from the client to the server and having the server trust the client is a bad idea from that standpoint, but just storing it on the client isn't, as long as it is also stored on the server and the server doesn't get it from the client. The description isn't clear on the exact role of the client-side store in this regard: if its kept on the client just so the client never has to round-trip to the server to get it, only getting push updates as needed, there's no problem, its just a performance optimization.
Or you could set it in the dock that is sitting under the TV that routes the picture up to the same screen that the traditional console would have used, and then use a bluetooth controller to control it. The Game Console/Phone market is ripe for convergence.
That's one of those ideas that sounds nice, right until the first group gathering where the person whose phone is being used as a game console gets an important call...
Paper maps are at least as likely as electronic navigation devices (they face similar problems to preloaded electronic databases, and are clearly worse in this regard than systems which download map and incident information in realtime) to fail to be provide accurate navigation information for advance planning (either being out of date or not reflecting transient traffic or other incidents that close routes, alter allowable directions of travel, etc.)
And when they fail for this reason, they are much less convenient as an aid to a driver in quickly determining how to reroute to address the problem.
Used improperly, they are, but then so is anything else in the car, including the radio and the tachometer.
Do you really need a GPS for day-to-day driving?
No, that's why I don't have the GPS display on in normal day-to-day driving. OTOH, when I do need it, a GPS with a vehicle-centered, orientation-aware moving map display that I can glance at periodically is much less distracting than stopping, reading a map, and then driving while trying to recall the information from the map. Or compared to a GPS display that wasn't vehicle-centered and orientation aware so that each time I glanced at it it took more time to figure otu where the car is on the map and what the orientation of the map is compared to the current driving direction.
CHECK A MAP BEFORE YOU LEAVE! Folks that drive with GPS seem like some of the worst drivers on the road. Why? They are watching the screen and not the road signs.
People that would be watching the screen, rather periodically glancing at it for quick position fixes, while driving would probably be trying to read a map while driving if they didn't have a display. Getting rid of GPS moving-map displays -- which are far better when used properly -- won't make things better, it'll just mean that the people using navigation aids improperly will use worse navigation aids improperly, causing greater problems.
People need some common sense.
Taking useful tools out of the hands of people who have common sense won't magically give common sense to the people that don't have it.
Ok, so basically there's three Gods, and they're all God. And each one is also God. Jesus is God, Jesus's Father, God, is also God. Oh and there's the Holy Spirit - that's God too.
At least that's what it says in the bible.
Well, except for the fact that it doesn't say that anywhere in the Bible.
1) If you are running a business, $7500 for all the standards in the federal code is not a lot of money.
$7500 won't by all the private standards referenced in the Code of Federal Regulations. The organization referenced in TFS spent that much to by 73 of those standards, which wasn't all of them (they were only a subset of those that are "public safety standards", they weren't all of the private public safety standards referenced in the CFR, and public safety standards aren't the only standards referenced in the C.F.R. [for instance, the standard transaction specifications mandated under HIPAA will run you, IIRC, close to $3000 just for the subset that are produced by X12 -- there are others -- and before purchasing any of the hundreds of privately maintained external code sets or other documents referenced in the X12 standards with which compliance is equally mandatory under the HIPAA Transactions and Code Sets rule].)
At one point -- several years before the conversion to the current version of the X12 standards -- the federal government subsidized the publication of at least the X12 standards mandated under HIPAA and, while privately copyrighted, they were available electronically at no cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing something and being ready to take it to court are two different things. Also, part of the delay was settlement talks (which may have included cooperation on gathering evidence against the remaining defendants--notice that settlements with three of the five charged publishers were announced simultaneously with the announcement of the filing of the lawsuit.
The direct quotes in the complaint suggest that there is considerable paper trail mentioning targetting Amazon, both among the publishers and from Apple to the publishers.
Actually, no, the DoJ's angle on collusion appears to be (from actually reading the complaint -- see the section "VI. DEFENDANTS' UNLAWFUL ACTIVITIES" beginning on page 12) the series of communications between the publishers in which they conspired to jointly raise the retail prices of e-books by establishing the agency model as standard, which was initiated prior to Apple's attempts to enter the e-book market, and continued after that entrance (and specifically included mutual support in conflicts with Amazon after the Apple deals were implemented.)
The MFN clause is alleged to have become a key signalling mechanism once Apple was brought in, but isn't the key of the case alleging the existence of collusion.
Independently of why the signal is there and whether there is a need to control the bike (which, by the way, you are quite wrong on, as you would know if you'd ever been anywhere with large numbers of bikes and paid any attention), the fact is that the traffic signal is there, and actually affects the ability to operate any vehicle through the intersection. Consequently, there is a substantial practical disadvantage to a vehicle that will not be detected by mechanisms designed to provide traffic-responsive behavior for the signal, even if it is not the kind of vehicle that motivated the placement of the signal.
Having enough top-level options that you have to scroll through them to find the one you want is bad no matter the form factor. While I don't know if the existing Metro implementation lets you do this, having tiles for groups of options that explode-on-hover (reducing the old list to a single tile that you can return to) would seem to be consistent with the Metro UI design principles and be a good approach for a keyboard-and-mouse interface.
The Metro implementation may currently suck for lots of uses, but the UI principles its built in I think are good UI principals that ought to get more attention in UI design.
I'm not at all an MS fan, but Metro seems to be a good direction in UIs, and not just for mobile devices. The pile-of-papers metaphor of traditional windowing UIs is really a horrible mess when you think about it, and recent trend in adding 3D and transparency features to it doesn't really address the problem.
The Metro approach is an approach that really has a lot going for it. I'm not saying the implementation is necessarily great, but the concepts, starting from content-not-chrome, are good and I expect that UIs will continue to evolve in the direction Metro is pointing.
They are. That's rather the point of Google own social networking efforts.
Pushing open standards without their own strong social networking system (as they have in the past) was a failure. Just as their fight to drive more general web standards the way they wanted led to building their own browser that directly competed with the existing dominant browsers, and their fight to avoid the mobile space from being locked up by a dominant vendor that wasn't Google that could lock Google out of revenues led to building their own mobile OS that competed directly with the existing dominant mobile OSs, so their fight to stop the web getting locked up by a single social networking vendor leads to building a social network that competes with Facebook.
Their strategy with Android was going into direct competition with Apple for mobile OS's and linked services (they didn't compete with them as directly with handsets, but they aren't concerned with Apple-as-handset-manufacturer, they are concerned with Apple-as-mobile-OS-vendor.)
So, applying their strategy with Android to social networking would be "a better strategy than going into direct competition with Facebook", it would be exactly the strategy of going into direct competition with Facebook.
(And its a strategy that's worked with Chrome and Android, though in both cases early on people said that those efforts were doomed to have little benefit for Google given how well established the major competition was in each area, and that Google would be better off not going to toe-to-toe with them.)
Well, that, and the fact that google didn't push their own social network instead of working on open protocols for sharing.
Google has pushed a number of open standards for information exchange, both in general and in the social space specifically.
They also are pushing their own social network.
Using information voluntarily provided to provide services to the person providing information isn't "trampling on" the privacy of the person providing the information.
Sharing that information with third parties in a means beyond what that for which there is meaningful informed consent is.
Getting bent out of shape over things that don't impinge on privacy as if they did impedes efforts to focus attention on stopping actions that genuinely impinge on privacy.
No, the police didn't. Which is why the lead homicide investigator wanted Zimmerman charged. It was the DA that rejected that on the basis that, given "SYG" and the inconsistencies in the evidence, there was insufficient evidence to obtain a conviction.
You are mistaking "punishable" for "universally and consistently punished". But the point of making very common things punishable is generally for them not to be universally and consistently punished, but to provide easy pretexts for arbitrary punishment where the real motivation for the punishment isn't the thing that is "punishable".
A more accurate statement would be "if being in contempt of DHS was punishable, there would be a convenient pretext for punishing anyone".
If you reread GP, the role of certain sites terms of service in regards to existing law was already addressed. Not all sites ToS expressly forbid sharing passwords (a common alternative is for the ToS to include the account holder expressly accepting responsibility for all use with their password.)
While Facebook is the biggest social networking site and often the center of attention, the issue isn't about Facebook alone, its about online account passwords more generally.
Making something a condition under which employment is offered is not generally considered "coercion".
No, there aren't. There are existing laws which may make accessing a computer system illegal even with a password given to you by the owner of the password, depending on the terms of service under which the owner of the system provides service to the password holder. Nothing makes it illegal in general for an employer to make such a request or to make use of the password obtained through it.
Requesting a password as a condition of employment or any other beneficial or contractual arrangement is in no way a violation of either the Fourth Amendment or Fifth Amendment. (Using employment as a pretext by the government when the target is a criminal suspect and then using the information in a criminal trial might be, but that's not the general issue.)
Unless Facebook can demonstrate actual damages, they probably have no case, at least under federal law. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act provides criminal sanctions, and provides civil sanctions to anyone experiencing actual damage or loss.
The Stored Communication Act also provides criminal and civil sanction and does provide statutory minimum damages, but incorporates a broad rates of exemptions from civil action including prior consent of a party to the communication.
So, neither seems likely to be of much use to Facebook.
No, there are not (in the general case of demanding online account passwords.) In some specific cases, the combination of existing laws and terms of service prohibiting password sharing might prevent this (some TOS don't prohibit password sharing, they require the user to accept liability for any use with their password -- so in the case of sites with TOS of this form, nothing in existing law would prohibit the demand), and even then may not provide appropriate remedies.
The US Congress, unlike some state legislatures, has no single subject rule and neither party has ever been adverse to non-germane legislation in general. The only reason that an amendment is not "appropriate" for a particular bill is that someone wants to be able to defeat the rule in the amendment without defeating the bill.
No one -- even Microsoft -- is asking for "blind adoption". The Microsoft proposal offers numerous explicit issues for discussion and raises and provides a recommendations for addressing numerous issues with regards to Google's earlier proposal (both as regards to pragmatics and consistency with the HTTP/2.0 charter.) Its a discussion draft. Its not intended for blind adoption, its intended to spur further discussion in the work group.
Why not address the merits of the proposal?
The same is a federal crime under the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC Sec. 1030) if the computer accessed is a "protected computer", including a government computer or, more relevantly, one "used in interstate or foreign commerce or communication, including a computer located outside the United States that is used in a manner that affects interstate or foreign commerce or communication of the United States".
Well, unauthorized access per se isn't a crime, but if one does almost anything with that access it is a crime, including if one "obtains...information from any protected computer".
And, as well as a crime, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act also provides a civil cause of action for anyone who "suffers damage or loss by reason of a violation of this section" (note that conspiracy is also covered under the same section, so the civil cause of action would seem to be available if the damage was caused by a conspiracy to gain unauthorized access that didn't actually lead to unauthorized access, such as retaliation -- by refusal to consider for a job or, even more clearly, dismissal from one -- for failure to provide a password contrary to an agreement with the computer's owner.)
Maybe not the most last, but recent examples include:
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010)
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010)
HITECH Act (part of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act) (2009)
Not necessarily.
Storing it on the client and sending it back from the client to the server and having the server trust the client is a bad idea from that standpoint, but just storing it on the client isn't, as long as it is also stored on the server and the server doesn't get it from the client. The description isn't clear on the exact role of the client-side store in this regard: if its kept on the client just so the client never has to round-trip to the server to get it, only getting push updates as needed, there's no problem, its just a performance optimization.
"feature parody"?
That's one of those ideas that sounds nice, right until the first group gathering where the person whose phone is being used as a game console gets an important call...
If you can't communicate without whole sentences in all caps and/or triple exclamation points, you should stay off the Internet.
Paper maps are at least as likely as electronic navigation devices (they face similar problems to preloaded electronic databases, and are clearly worse in this regard than systems which download map and incident information in realtime) to fail to be provide accurate navigation information for advance planning (either being out of date or not reflecting transient traffic or other incidents that close routes, alter allowable directions of travel, etc.)
And when they fail for this reason, they are much less convenient as an aid to a driver in quickly determining how to reroute to address the problem.
Used properly, they aren't.
Used improperly, they are, but then so is anything else in the car, including the radio and the tachometer.
No, that's why I don't have the GPS display on in normal day-to-day driving. OTOH, when I do need it, a GPS with a vehicle-centered, orientation-aware moving map display that I can glance at periodically is much less distracting than stopping, reading a map, and then driving while trying to recall the information from the map. Or compared to a GPS display that wasn't vehicle-centered and orientation aware so that each time I glanced at it it took more time to figure otu where the car is on the map and what the orientation of the map is compared to the current driving direction.
People that would be watching the screen, rather periodically glancing at it for quick position fixes, while driving would probably be trying to read a map while driving if they didn't have a display. Getting rid of GPS moving-map displays -- which are far better when used properly -- won't make things better, it'll just mean that the people using navigation aids improperly will use worse navigation aids improperly, causing greater problems.
Taking useful tools out of the hands of people who have common sense won't magically give common sense to the people that don't have it.
Well, except for the fact that it doesn't say that anywhere in the Bible.
$7500 won't by all the private standards referenced in the Code of Federal Regulations. The organization referenced in TFS spent that much to by 73 of those standards, which wasn't all of them (they were only a subset of those that are "public safety standards", they weren't all of the private public safety standards referenced in the CFR, and public safety standards aren't the only standards referenced in the C.F.R. [for instance, the standard transaction specifications mandated under HIPAA will run you, IIRC, close to $3000 just for the subset that are produced by X12 -- there are others -- and before purchasing any of the hundreds of privately maintained external code sets or other documents referenced in the X12 standards with which compliance is equally mandatory under the HIPAA Transactions and Code Sets rule].)
At one point -- several years before the conversion to the current version of the X12 standards -- the federal government subsidized the publication of at least the X12 standards mandated under HIPAA and, while privately copyrighted, they were available electronically at no cost.